Retirement planning

And…they’re off! Nick and Grant are in Japan for the next two weeks, visiting Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Mount Fuji, and Hakone. We’re very excited for them and can’t wait to hear all the stories when they get back.

Since retiring, I’m often asked what I do with my time now. Some people I’ve talked to say they’ll have no problem finding things to keep themselves busy when they retire, while others are hesitant to leave work because they don’t know what they’ll do with all that free time.

A few years ago, I took a retirement course offered to government employees. Some of the things that stuck with me were:

• People spend far more time and energy on financial planning than they do on planning the non-financial aspects of retirement.
• What you enjoy doing on weekends, when you’re decompressing from your work week, won’t necessarily translate into a full-time retirement plan.
• You get value from work in ways that might not be obvious – structure, routine, social contact, sense of purpose, intellectual stimulation, recognition, etc. Think about if/how you’ll replace those things in retirement.
• Research indicates that people do best in retirement if about one-third of their time is structured/scheduled.

After taking the course, I diligently got to work on my non-financial retirement plan. I identified categories – social; health; intellectual; hobbies/interests; lifestyle; meaning/purpose – then expanded each category. I thought about things I enjoyed doing, things I used to enjoy but was no longer doing, and things that I’d never done but was interested in trying. I re-worked the categories and created a mind map to represent my retirement plan.

Each category drills down to sub-categories and then to specific “to-do” items. For example, under hobbies I’d added ‘learn to quilt’, but first I needed to buy a sewing machine and take sewing lessons.

Lifestyle was probably the toughest category to nail down and it’s still very fluid. It covers questions like whether to sell the house or stay where we are; what type of travel we want to do and for how long, whether to get a dog; etc.

So, how’s it working for me so far? Well, I’m definitely not bored and I don’t miss work, but balance is a challenge. I’m devoting rather too much time to thinking and planning (e.g., making retirement mind maps or writing blog posts about making retirement mind maps; or researching places to travel and obsessively checking house sitting sites), and not allocating as much time as I’d like to the 3 “H” categories (health, hobbies and household). Ray is far better than I am at structure and self-discipline, so he has a better balance and retirement routine going, but he’s also been ‘semi-retired’ for 11 years so he kind of had a head start.

I have a theory about people’s retirement plans though. You know those items that stay on your to-do list week after week, month after month, and even year after year? The things you never get to because you’re too busy, but you promise yourself you’ll do when you have more time? Maybe you want to read Tolstoy or finally finish Catch-22, or perhaps you’ve always wanted to learn another language. Maybe you’d like to cook healthier meals, or to meditate regularly and take up yoga. You might be planning to make photo-books, or organize your closet. Well, isn’t it possible that (*spoiler alert*) you don’t really want to do those things? That you like the idea of doing those things, but not the reality, and maybe that’s the real reason those things don’t ever get done? Just a hypothesis I’m working on.

What Ray’s been working on – which is slightly more practical than the hypothesis-testing and mind maps I’ve been working on – is replacing the garage roof. You’ll be forgiven if you’re thinking, “I thought he just did that” since he’s done a roof a year for four years – the pergola, the house, the sugar shack, and now the garage. Unless he’s planning to replace the roof on the bird feeder, we should be done for a bit after this.